Group policies sporadically reverting

[deadlight]

We have had an issue randomly occuring accross systems in our environment when certain settings managed by gpo will revert. A simple gpupdate /force remediates the issue, but we are having trouble figuring out what is actually happening. The issue happens on mostly Vista machines that are mobile. However, we have seen this occur numerous times on machines wired directly in an office.

The main settings we see reverting are:
IE Homepage, Aero Theme

Others (less often) include:
Windows Defender, Firewall

We have the 'Internet Explorer Mainteance policy processing' set to 'Allow processing across a slow network connection' and 'Process even if the Group Policy objects have not changed'

Anyone have a general idea on what might be causing something like this? Log data doesn't seem to be very helpful as it is random as well. I have seen the following:

"The system call to get account information completed.

The call failed after 0 milliseconds."

"Group Policy failed to discover the Domain Controller details in 2870 milliseconds."

"Error: Retrieved account information. Error code 0x54B."

"Periodic policy processing failed for computer DOMAIN\COMPUTER$ in 0 seconds."

"The LDAP call to connect and bind to Active Directory completed.
Computer.domain
The call failed after 422 milliseconds."

Many Thanks in advance...

[jeremym]

First.. Check the policies keys in the registry. Those should HAVE the data. If not, can you be sure that the machines in question ever GOT the data?

Also.. not being able to find the DCs sounds like a DNS issue.

Are you sure it's a specific setting.. or specific computers?